I understand you are going to start the project with the feature set that you need. But are you really going to leave out the mylyn trademark functionality? The context sensitive UI/Project display thingie (can’t remember technical term).

As far as existing open projects that have some of this functionality, this is what I could quickly dig up.

Wiki Editing:
http://www.meadowy.org/~gotoh/projects/trac-wiki/wiki

(I was getting 500 error here, so this is a google cache version)
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:CVr6zmfpEjcJ:www.meadowy.org/~gotoh/projects/trac-wiki/wiki+trac+emacs&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

Wiki editing is probably the most complex thing on your list. As working with tickets TRAC has a pretty accessible API we can use to give you that functionality. That part should be pretty easy to do. I guess building a suitable CLI for that module would be the interesting part. Maybe we can find some inspiration in goosh? I know modern versions of emacs have more UI/graphical prowess then I give it credit for, so it should be possible to do something like that.

Looks like you have management of tasks figured out.

Sounds like a cool project. I am a lisp illiterate, but let me know if I can help out in any way.

Second, I also agree that the greatest asset a piece software can have is being extensible. We have seen the runaway success things like Firefox and Eclipse have had. Yes, I am perfectly aware that they did not invent the concept, and this was being done 10 years ago by emacs, or whatever. But these are more “mainstream” products that have brought the concept of extensibility to people that would normally never consider the concept. They also have very cool ways of deploying their extensible plugins or extensions, that I personally had not seen in practice before, but I could be wrong.

Even though it’s not free (as in beer or as in speech), the iPhone/iTouch is bringing extensibility to the smart phone market. Although palms and other similar devices have had this feature for a while, it has done it in an elegant way. Now everyone is rethinking what a cell phone is, and how they use it in their daily lives. I think the new term that is trying to be coined is “palm top computer”, because it really stopped being a phone a long time ago.

I think in 10 years we are going to look back and declare that the iPhone/iTouch is going to be most important computer related invention of this decade. Not only for it’s own merits, but for everything else that will directly, or indirectly come out as a consequence of it’s existence. Ranging from products that run on the device, to products that competitors make as a response.

Third, I also think that intelligent software can be a very interesting third frontier. We have to be very careful what we consider software intelligence thought. As clippy and the Office collapsing menus have shown us, something that has the intent of making your life easier can very quickly make you pull your hair out.

I consider myself an (AI wannabe) ^ 2. I am also fascinated by the subject (but which geek isn’t). I have some books on it (not that I have gotten around to reading them yet). Making adaptable software is definitely a place where we can grow.

As far as the OS you are looking for, you will never find it. I am sorry to say it’s just not possible. All the popular (and not so popular) choices we have today will make you compromise on one or other thing eventually.

I will recommend what I have recommended to you dozens of times. Get 4 - 8 GBs of RAM (you already have some good horsepower), load XEN or VMWare ESXI (they both run off the metal, without an underlying OS), and run 2 or 3 OSs at a time. Do your editing in Linux and listen to music on Windows. Do the activities that you like on the OS that you like. We have the technology and the hardware resources to do it.

The only drawback to this kind of technique is that you will have administer all the OSs, which can be a pain in the ass, especially for a person that is so picky like you. I don’t have a solution for this. I simply recommend that you take one OS (your pick, I don’t care) as your main OS, make sure that one is up to date, and solid. The other ones don’t really matter. You can keep snapshots of them, if the get corrupt, you can just restore them at any point in time.

Of course, I think you are just going to continue with your merry go round of OSs anyway, irrelevant of what I say.

So hell yes I’m a fan.

In any case, I appreciate your perspective on the stuff we discussed. I also appreciate your recommendation.

Thanks.

Now here’s my problem with these statements.
1. If the only thing making OS X safer is it’s small numbers then it’s not very safe to being with. Add in the sales of Ipod’s and Iphones with OS X and you have a lot of new hacking abilities coming out in the future. Also this kind of makes me appreciate Linux even more.
2. Microsoft has it’s fingers in many pies but very few of them are profitable, they make the lions share of their money on software. With Apple making great consumer products and achieving such high market penetration into the PC crowd it’s not difficult to see people adding OS X to their PC’s especially if they could get all the apple connectivity with their household electronics without having to make the huge leap to a Mac. I myself almost went with a Mac this winter but held back because I wanted a quad core computer with at least 4 gb of ram and a terabyte hard drive for my work. Now for a Mac that would have cost me $2700+, I spent $1400 including a new LCD screen. Hardly a comparison for the cost, and quite a difference from the notion of “Apple Macs, with superior hardware, for prices that are, 100% of the time, cheaper than any name brand comparably equipped PC (many hundreds cheaper, when you get to the higher configurations).” As stated in the above post. Would I like a Mac yes, but not at those prices. Now I know they would sell a lot more software than described before simply because your looking at new hardware sales vrs. existing units that might have it installed. If Apple were to make it easy to install onto existing PC’s you’d see a large portion of sales move in this direction, then in a few years many of those people would move over to MAC’s since they are already familiar with the system. Now let’s look at the math a bit again. If Apple could make 1/4 the profit it makes in hardware from software why not? You have to factor in the amount of money tied up in computers until it sell’s where as software is less expensive to produce. With software you can ship 50x more copies than you can 1 computer. So while a store may carry 100 computers in stock they could carry several hundred OS’s in only a few boxes and therefore sell more. Even if the computer doesn’t have OS X on it I as a consumer may opt to buy it and install it right from the start knowing that as my needs change I could add a smaller MAC to my network and have no problems down the road further increasing Apples bottom line.

The complexity of the interaction of zillions of different hardware combinations, poor quality drivers, or the access to poorly written 4th party drivers to 3rd party hardware, and the radically increased complexity driven by this extreme diversity, would make the Mac as problematic as a Windows box.

Me, I will continue to buy Apple Macs, with superior hardware, for prices that are, 100% of the time, cheaper than any name brand comparably equipped PC (many hundreds cheaper, when you get to the higher configurations).

Allowing poor quality hardware and drivers to exist in the OS X world, would degrade the experience to that of a PC.

BTW: in managing IT environments with as many as 262,000 desktop computers, I can empirically state that Macs cost a fraction (10-25%) of a PC over the typical 3 year life of a corporate machine. Acquisition cost is such a minor factor in the life cycle price of the machine, that, even IF a Mac cost more, it would be a sound financial decision.

Opening up the hardware platform would remove that tremendous advantage that a Mac currently has.